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Rebound for Redound

From the E-Trade Financial section of the New York Times, 11/2/2005:

“Up until this morning, Mr. Blair had seemed to be supporting his ally, whose problems seemed increasingly to be rebounding onto the prime minister himself. Indeed, Mr. Blunkett said, Mr. Blair had asked him to stay on when the two men met for the first of two discussions during a morning of high drama.”

This seems to be a misuse of the reflexive verb “redound” as in “His problems soon redounded to his office”). However, as used here, one gets the active visual image of problems being thrown against a wall and bouncing, like a basketball, back to the prime minister. I think I like it better than “redound.”

Re: Rebound for Redound

The situation with “rebound/redound” is more complex than this old post suggests. The example it cites may not even be a substitution of “rebound” for “redound.” The person may well have been thinking about problems bouncing back.

“Rebound” and “redound” have been cross-pollinating for six centuries. “Redound” derives from the Latin verb “undare,” to flow and some of its meanings are direct reflections of this pedigree. When “redound” is followed by “with,” it often carries the sense of overflowing, having abundance (“to redound with honor” is to overflow with honor). When “redound” is followed by “to,” it usually means “contributing to” (“to redound to the profit of” means to increase the profit). Some of the meanings listed for “redound” in dictionaries, however, such as “return/recoil” (“our carelessness redounds upon us”) and “echo, reverberate” (“the noise redounded along the empty street”) have probably been influenced by “rebound.”

The best chance to locate “redound >> rebound” in the eggcornome may be in sentences containing “rebound to” or “rebound with.” When we Google “rebound to the benefit of” (see search here) and “rebound to the credit of” (see search here), it seems likely that we are looking confusions with “redound.”